


baby girl picking thorns through the daffodils (i loved you all my life)

by possibilist



Series: Fool's Gold Carmilla HSAU Deleted Scenes [3]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, PAPA HOLLIS THE REAL MVP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 20:21:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3147356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You laugh and take her hand again and follow her to her locker while she rambles, and she’s just so beautiful and she looks at you like you’re sort of very special—you can tell, even though it’s a weird look, it’s super nice—and you think you’re really lucky."</p><p>as i've been commissioned by felixdawkins & turnandchasethewind on tumblr; whatsthedamage on a03—fool's gold chapter 10 deleted scenes: laura's, papa hollis', & carmilla's povs. canon compliant, guys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	baby girl picking thorns through the daffodils (i loved you all my life)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whatsthedamage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsthedamage/gifts).



> 1\. definitely canon for fool's gold, carmilla's hsau; i actually get told by olivia & bianca the exact scenes they want me to write.
> 
> 2\. trigger warnings: implied eating disorder; implied child abuse.

**baby girl picking thorns through the daffodils (i loved you all my life)**

.

_i don’t want to go home with you, drive me just a little more/ you don’t have to say anything, just scoot closer to me/ stars light up the sky, telling me everything will be all right/ we move fast & slow_  
—MADE IN HEIGHTS, ‘viices’

//

“Did you  _know_ how they make corals for fish tanks?”

Carmilla is very adamant that apparently this is really cool knowledge, and you’re kind of confused as to  _why_ she knows a lot about fish tanks, but she’s holding your hand and for some reason it makes you feel infinitely better when you walk into the cafeteria, and she’s very into this. “No. How do they make them?”

She grins, and you frown when she drops her hand and gestures for you to stand in front of her in line, and you just grab a random tray from the middle of the selection because you're paying a lot of attention to Carmilla.

“ _Well_ ,” she says, “the best ones are fiberglass, because, you know, BPA—stuff in plastic, like water bottles—is poisonous to fish. Even though the fiberglass is expensive, but whatever.”

You try to hide a smile by worrying your bottom lip, because she’s explaining this at the same time she’s carefully selecting four fish sticks like the world depends on the perfect ones, and then she  _dumps_ a bunch of ranch dressing over them.

She looks up and continues, “And then the big bases are painted either browns a greys, depending on where you want the tank to look like it’s from—which area of the ocean—because different reefs in different geographical locations have slightly varied colors.” She snags a chocolate milk with a toss to herself, and you laugh.

She’s so happy—talking about fish tanks, which is weird, but okay, and you add to the list of Carmilla being pretty much super adorable and you’re so glad she’s your best friend—that you don’t notice you’re at the end of the line until you’re kind of  _right there_ , and you’re fumbling in your backpack for your wallet, embarrassed, because you can’t have  _one moment_ of actually being good enough, even at simple things, when Carmilla stills your hand with hers and says, “This one,” she points to her tray, “and this one,” she points to yours, “get my discount.”

The cashier nods. “Carm, I can—”

She rolls her eyes. “Come on, I get, like, fifty percent off because of my mom, so it doesn’t really cost me more money relatively in the long run, don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks,” you mumble and take your tray, and it’s so sweet and  _she’s_ so sweet, but you really just  _hate_ the cafeteria, and you’re a little embarrassed, but Carmilla jogs a few steps and then grimaces a second before she says, “ _Okay_ , so  _then_ —” and you can’t help break out into a smile that you know crinkles all the way up to your eyes.

“What?” she asks, sitting down next to you and taking your hand.

You kiss her cheek and she stiffens before she smiles again and turns toward you. “You’re just—why do you know so much about fish tanks?”

She looks down and pushes around very questionable looking coleslaw with her fork before putting it down and then taking a big bite of her fish stick with her fingers, getting ranch pretty much all over them, which she licks off, and you kind of, like, don’t think for a few seconds, but—

“There’s a show about them,” she says, “that I watch when I’m sick sometimes. It’s super educational and stuff, so, you know, not  _cool_ or whatever, but usually I just fall asleep.”

She looks at you and takes another messy bite and you smile, which makes her smile, and she has ranch on one side of her mouth, and you grab your napkin and wipe it off, which makes her smile grow wider and she pretends to bite at your hand.

“Anyway, Laura Hollis,” she says, “corals are  _actually_ living, or, clusters of them, they grow together, so there’s lots of custom synthetics that are made with all  _kinds_ of different colors, hand-painted and hand-crafted, with this special kind of texturing—um, goop?”

“Goop?” You laugh.

“I forgot the name,” she grumbles, takes a big bite of her coleslaw, then pulls a face, which makes you giggle again.

She glances down at your tray and pulls the same face, because, when you look down, you’d gotten the mystery meat special, and you grimace. 

“Want a fish stick?” she asks.

You laugh. “No, I think you’re enjoying those a little too much for me to steal them.”

She rolls her eyes but eats some more, and you pick a little bit at the mashed potatoes that aren’t soaked in gravy from the meat, and then she’s letting go of your hand taking a big drink of her chocolate milk, and you glance down at her lips afterward when she licks at the top one, and your stomach sort of does a weird flop and you feel like you suddenly  _really_ have to pee, but then you’re laughing because she has a milk mustache. She rolls her eyes but she blushes—it’s so pretty—and then wipes her mouth with a napkin, then both of her hands, with a frown, her pants. 

She makes the whole thing just look—“You’re kind of magic, you realize?”

She looks a little taken aback, and probably it’s because she just ate fish sticks like a teenage boy, but then she grins and says, “No, that’s you, sweetheart.”

You look down and shake your head, and she stands and somehow makes climbing out from the bench look graceful. 

She takes her tray and you take yours, and then she laces your fingers, and at this point is super natural, you think, because her hand just feels really great, and it works out just fine when she sits on your left, because she’s left-handed and you’re right-handed, so it’s even more perfect.

She glances around quickly and then dumps her coleslaw in the trash before putting her tray on the conveyer by the washroom. You don’t even bother looking before you start to dump out your food—there was  _no_ way you were eating that—but then the  _very_ scary and possibly Russian lunch lady is scolding you— _very loudly_ —for not eating her food, and, like, half of the caf is turning to look at you, and you entire body flushes, and tears immediately spring to your eyes, and you feel  _so big_.

But then Carmilla is looking worriedly to you for a moment before squeezing your hand and saying, angrily, you know, but  _so_ calmly, “Do you know who my mother is?”

The lunch lady looks Carmilla over once—in her ripped jeans and her t-shirt and leather backpack slung over one shoulder, her heavy, sturdy boots, and then it seems to dawn on her, and she just turns around and walks off.

“Fucking  _prick_ ,” Carmilla says, then tugs on your hand until you’re walking next to her, a little lightheaded, out of the caf. “ _God_ ,” she says, going to a row of lockers and lamely kicking at them. She turns to you, and she looks a little out of her element, because you kind of  _really_ feel like crying, and she says, “Oh, come on, Laura,” and then pulls you into a soft hug.

You soak in her musky, gentle smell—sort of like winter, sort of like the softness of snow and the spice of fireplace smoke—before she pulls back and says, “Also! There are  _tons_ of new species of ocean life being found  _every day_!”

You laugh and take her hand again and follow her to her locker while she rambles about a very expensive submarine, and she’s just so beautiful, and you probably won’t ever be that beautiful, but she looks at you like you’re sort of very special—you can tell, even though it’s a weird look, it’s super nice—and you think you’re really lucky.

//

Carmilla kind of wanders over toward you instead of actually helping, which makes sense, she’s not really dressed for this kind of thing, and you’re pretty sure she’s really only here for Laura, who is currently not sparing a second glance at  _any_ of the boys in speedos around her, instead throwing a sponge at Danny’s head, which hits her in the chest, and you laugh.

Carmilla plops down next to you, puts her elbow on her knee and leans forward to put her chin in the palm of her hand, and then she smiles.

Whatever Laura might think about Carmilla, or whatever she ends up thinking, Carmilla’s a pretty good kid, you’ve learned, and she’s really good to Laura, and that’s all you and Lily ever wanted for Laura to have in her life, so you’re happy—even if she did make Laura cry for a little bit; Laura’s always been so kind and quick to forgive, and maybe someone like Carmilla needs that.

She laughs when Kirsch tries to dump some water over Laura’s head and she scrambles out of the way with an angry little face, and you glance down at her.

Sometimes you forget, but she’s almost as small as Laura, and she stretches out her legs and turns her head up at you—she’s wearing sunglasses, but you assume she’s looking at you too—with a raised eyebrow.

“How are you feeling?” you ask.

She tenses. “What?”

“Laura told me you fell down some stairs at home.” The thought almost makes you feel sick to your stomach, but you push it back quickly, because Carmilla is relaxing a little bit.

“Of course she did,” she mutters, and you laugh a little.

“She does talk about you a lot.”

She blushes and smiles down at her feet—she’s not wearing boots today, for once, instead an old beat up pair of red converse—before she says, “She talks a lot in general.”

You laugh. “Her mom and I used to say that Laura talked more than the both of us put together, from that first word on.”

“I don’t find that hard to believe.”

You smile as you picture Laura when she was a toddler—saying her first word; taking her first steps. “She laughed so much, even then. At completely random things.”

Carmilla grins. “I’m glad some things haven’t changed, then.”

You kind of realize then that Carmilla probably loves Laura, in whatever way that means. You know her other friends love her, too, but Carmilla doesn’t really seem to be generous with her attention, so it makes it kind of special. And Laura  _is_ so full of love, so she definitely deserves people to love her back.

You watch the carwash for a little while, and Carmilla seems content to just hang out next to you, laughing every now and then, and she lies back for a few minutes before she decides against that, apparently, and sits back up.

Laura trips a little bit over a hose and your heart skips a beat—as does Carmilla’s, apparently, because she almost scrambles to get up—before Laura kind of  _smacks_ into Kirsch, who laughs and steadies her out, and probably makes some joke, because Laura looks mortified before she slaps him in the shoulder and turns around with a huff. Another sign, probably, you think. You’re trying to keep track.

“Once, when Laura was seven,” you say, and Carmilla looks up at you, suddenly paying what seems like a lot more attention than normal, “she and Lily—uh, her mom—and I were playing this really  _terrible_  board game she’d invented.”

Carmilla laughs.

“I still don’t really know what the point of the game was, but Laura stood up to go to the bathroom, I think, and then completely tripped over the board, which, in her defense, was part of a cardboard box.”

Carmilla turns toward you fully and slips her sunglasses off, tucks them into the collar of her shirt. You wince at her black eye—you can tell it’s quite the shiner, even though it’s covered some by her bangs—and she looks down self-consciously. Laura had knocked her into the trampoline last week too, poor kid—so you don’t say anything, only continue with your story—it is one of your favorites, after all.

“Anyway,” you say, “on her way down, Laura kind of fell into one of the little tables in our living room, and it was near Christmas, so it had all of these snow globes she collected.”

“Snow globes,” Carmilla says, then laughs. “So Laura.”

You nod. “She sent them all crashing and like, nine of them broke or something.”

Carmilla seems to take a few ragged breaths and swallow a lot, but then she laughs. It sounds kind of strained.

“She had this big bump on her head and was very upset that she’d broken them, and once Lily and I made sure she was okay, we had to try  _really hard_ not to laugh, because, I mean, the kid had just taken out a table of snow globes because she tripped over a board game she’d made while she was trying to go pee.” It makes you laugh a lot even to remember it, because Laura was small and in her pajamas and very, very upset over, frankly, really  _ugly_ snow globes, and Lily had been almost vibrating with stifled laughter when she’d crawled over to collect Laura.

“So I cleaned up while Lily calmed Laura down—they used to do this thing, Laura would lie back in Lily’s lap, and she’d trace little patterns on Laura’s forehead.”

Carmilla lights up very quietly at that and nods. “She—I had a headache the other day, it’s—it feels really relaxing.” 

You file that away in your growing list—Laura hasn’t done that with anyone until Carmilla, so. That means something too. It makes you feel really  _happy_ , though, because—well, Carmilla does have a black eye.

“Yeah, it’s—Laura reminds me a lot of Lily in that way; kind and gentle.”

Carmilla worries her bottom lip and stares at her shoes. “She’s—she’s lovely.”

You grin. “Yeah. So, um, yeah. Lily calmed her down, and I cleaned everything up, and she was still pretty upset, because—just wait, she’s still kinda attached to those snow globes, and, Carmilla, they’re  _ugly_.”

She laughs freely, her head thrown back. 

“But, you know, we took her to go get cocoa at Starbucks—for some reason she thought that was pretty much the coolest thing anyone could do in the world—and then we went and let her pick out, like, twelve new snow globes.” You remember Laura sitting in the shopping cart at the Target, absolutely overjoyed, a little bruise blooming on her forehead, but not seeming to care because she had so many choices. “We blew, like, eighty bucks on snow globes that night, but—you know, to see Laura happy—”

“Yeah,” Carmilla says. “She’s special like that.”

“She’s also so clumsy,” you say. “There have been many accidentally broken things in the Hollis household over the years. Kid’s cost me a lot of money.”

Carmilla stays very quiet.

“But, you know, she makes up for it in spades. I’m proud of her, even if that’s, you know, bragging.”

Carmilla shrugs. “She’s lucky to have you as a dad.”

For some reason, it strikes you as a very sad—and very meaningful—compliment.

“Thanks.”

“Sure,” Carmilla says.

“So,” you say, leaning a little more toward her, “Laura told me you play, and I quote, ‘about a million instruments.’”

She groans, but it’s not actually frustrated you don’t think. “Definitely not a million. I just—I’ve always liked music.”

“You have the whole musician vibe going for you.”

She laughs, unfolds her sunglasses and sticks them back on. “Why thank you, Mark.”

You laugh. “You’re a pretty good kid, too, you know.”

She swallows and shrinks a little bit, crosses her legs again. “I’m not really.”

It makes your heart sink, because Carmilla always seems kind of sad. “Well, you’ve been really great for Laura, and her grade in math has gone up, so, in my book, that definitely qualifies you for pretty good.”

She shakes her head but says, “Thanks,” really quietly.

“You’re welcome, kiddo.”

She sits back again and starts to tell you a little story about when she got her first guitar, and whatever love Laura might end up giving her, she’s really lucky.

//

Your heart drops.

**Mother (3:56 pm):** _Where are you? Please be home in half an hour, sweetheart._

You don’t want to leave but you also can’t really deal with more bruises this close together—it’d break ribs probably, and you’ve had enough of those—so you tell Laura, “Listen, I got a text from Shonda, she needs me to do an extra shift tonight so... I should go.”

She nod. “Right, yeah, totally. Thanks for coming.” She says it so earnestly you hurt at the fact that you have to lie to her—to her dad, to her friends. 

She gives you a hug, and you let yourself sink into it, ache into it, and today her shirt is wet from the car wash, and you can’t help but put a hand against the back of her head for a moment because she’s precious to you, and there’s nothing in the world that could convince you that you deserve someone as bright as Laura is, as good as Laura is.

You banter and flirt a little, because, whatever, you’re already miserable and Laura helps with that, even though you’re generally convinced she’s going to break your heart one of these days—but she hasn’t yet, so.

You walk off and check your pocket, make sure the movie stubs are there, as is the receipt for Starbucks from this morning. You’d been late getting to Laura’s because you’d had to swing by the small art house cinema not too far from your house and buy tickets for kind of the whole day of films—they know you, though, so you get a student discount, and you do have a job, after all, even though you have other things to spend your paycheck on now than vintage band posters for your room and films for just yourself. It’s a pretty believable excuse, really, because sometimes you actually  _do_ spend your entire Saturdays there by yourself watching old films and napping. Or, at least, you used to before Laura. Starbucks makes it better, because that accounts for the fact that you were out of the house far before noon on a Saturday.

You take exactly twenty-eight minutes to walk home—you don’t want to be there, but you also know you can’t be late at all—and when you walk in the front door, Mother comes out from the living room and wraps you in a hug. 

You think of Laura—her gentleness, how she was shorter than you, how her arms wrapped you up without any malice in them at all. 

“What did you do today, honey?” Mother asks.

You subtly walk into the kitchen and empty your pocket onto the table. “Saw some old movies—there was a noir marathon at the cinema.”

She raises a brow but then sees the torn ticket stubs and your heart sticks in your throat until she nods, seemingly appeased.

“Well,” she says, glancing over your body, “take a shower and put on something semi-formal, please, we have a dinner tonight.”

“Oh,” you say, because either you’d forgotten or she hadn’t told you, and it’s always hard to manage dresses with bruises, and blazers always feel so strange and so unlike  _you_ when you have to wear them, but at least she still lets you wear black. “Okay.”

She nods and you trudge up the stairs. “Let me know if you need help with your hair,” she calls after you, and you close your eyes for a moment—you  _won’t_ , you tell yourself, because, no matter how much your ribs hurt, you’re going to manage to get your curls into some semblance of something she approves as mildly elegant just so she doesn’t  _touch_ you again.

“Thanks, Mother, I’ll let you know.”

You have a few minutes to rest before you have to shower—you won’t go to dinner until six at least—and you curl up on your bed, press your back against the wall. If you try hard enough, you can almost imagine that it’s Laura’s soft, gentle warmth as the pressure behind you instead of unforgiving, cold plaster.

But you do get that warmth sometimes—and you’d slept through the night then—and you’re far luckier than you deserve.

**Author's Note:**

> check out fool's gold; track the tag [#carmilla hsau] on tumblr for general updates, fanart, & tons of amazing stuff.


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